Tuesday, November 29, 2011

I’ve been off work due to injury for a little over a month
now. And during that time, I’ve had half dozen x-rays, an MRI, and CT scan.
I’ve been to the ER, an orthopedic surgeon, magnetic imaging lab, and physical
therapy. Seems like I’ve spent the past 30 days in exam rooms waiting for the
doctor, tech, or therapist to walk in and ask with a sigh, “Now what, Brian?”

But as any “patient” knows, if your appointment time is 10:00,
you can count on seeing that medical professional somewhere around 11:45. So it helps to have a good book with
you.

My literary wingman on this adventure has been crime-writer Michael Connelly. I’ve already burned
through “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Brass Verdict,” and am now reading both “Nine
Dragons” and “Crime Beat,” Connelly’s memoirs of his days as crime reporter for
the Los Angeles Times.

We’re talking about more than a thousand pages of reading since
late last month.

Detective novels are not my usual fare, either. I admit that
when it comes to fiction, I’m something of a snob. Having read Chaucer’s “The
Canterbury Tales” in the original Middle English as part of my Master’s degree
requirements, I can be a bit high-minded about contemporary lit. But my go-to
authors, Cormac McCarthy, Tom McGuane, and Richard Ford didn’t seem to be a
good fit for waiting room distractions. So on my way to the orthopedic
surgeon—my left arm in a cast—I stopped in at a book store for a fast read, saw
a Connelly novel on an end-cap display, thumbed through the first few pages and
was immediately sold.

I think what separates Connelly from pulp fiction writers
and other best-selling detective novelists is his sharp prose and passages of
particular insight and poignancy that go well beyond average for the genre. This
excerpt from the “The Brass Verdict,” for example, resonated with me:

I went outside to the deck,
hoping the city could pull me out of the abyss into which I had fallen. The
night was cool and crisp and clear. Los Angeles spread out in front of me in a
carpet of lights, each one a verdict on a dream somewhere. Some people lived
the dream and some didn’t. Some people cashed in their dreams a dime on the
dollar and some kept them close and as sacred as the night. I wasn’t sure if I
even had a dream left. I felt like I only had sins to confess.

Good stuff.

As I said, he got his start in newsprint journalism, and in “Crime
Beat” his reflections on reportage and nonfiction prose also struck a chord:

The irony of crime beat journalism
--- maybe all journalism --- is that the best stories are really the worse
stories. The stories of calamity and tragedy are the stories that journalists
live for. It gets the adrenaline churning in their blood and can burn them out
young, but nevertheless it is a hard fact of the business. Their best day is
your worse day.

In some ways, that’s what I attempted to do through my own
writing on the now defunct blog site, Switch 2 Plan B. As a veteran fireman
turned amateur writer, I sought to capture and convey the pathos, irony, and even
dark humor I found in people’s most desperate hour: Those uniquely public,
and deeply private moments of grief, fear, and resignation which attended the countless scenes
of suffering, death, or catastrophic loss I witnessed over the years.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

I think what I like most about going to the hardware store
is that look on the sales associate’s face when I ask him a question:

“Do you have those little metal thingys, um, oh whatdya call
‘em? It’s kinda like a nail…only its all twisty and stuff,” I asked.

“A screw?” he replies, disgusted.

Well, hell, how was I supposed to know?

Most of these guys retired from the trades—former plumbers,
painters, and carpenters. So they have an unfair advantage over me from the
jump. Then they get all technical on me and stuff.

See, I go to my local hardware store for the customer
service. If I wanted to be ignored I’d go to one of those big-box home
improvement warehouses. Home Depot, Lowes—those are for men who actually know
what they’re doing, and exactly what they need to get the job done.

The rest of us go to Tru Value, or Ace.

So, this being a Saturday morning, I gulped down my
Follger’s instant, sneered at the op-ed page, and got down to making a list of
things I’d need for the do-it-myself day I had mapped out ahead, then drove to
the corner store.

And you know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life,
it’s this: If you’re going to the hardware store once, you’re going twice.
Because inevitably you’ll forget something, or break something else while trying
to fix whatever it was you were supposed to be fixing in the first place.

So there’s always that return trip to Ace.

And nothing says “dumbass” like walking back into the
hardware store 30 minutes later…either to buy to RIGHT part this time, or buy the EXACT
SAME part you purchased earlier because you’ve already snapped it in half.

Like I said: A lot of these sales clerks are retirees, so
when they see me come back in and ask for the very same part again, they pause,
get a puzzled look on their face (as the momentary déjà vu brings with it a fear
of early onset of Alzheimer’s), then frown disapprovingly, shaking their head and
wondering half-aloud how an all-powerful God could allow such a pathetic man to
be so completely inept at simple repairs.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Re-posting this from Thanksgiving past (on the now defunct Switch 2 Plan B site). It first "aired" November 2009:

Do you think Pilgrim women pushed back from the table that chill November in 1621 and said to each other, “That was yummy. Now—pray tell—what time do the malls open tomorrow morning?”

Our culture doesn’t even take a collective breath—doesn’t even sit back and unbutton its topmost button to allow the bloated belly of excess fully digest the sin of gluttony—before we head out again to the stores.

No matter. With garish Christmas displays displacing Halloween items on October shelves, soon the ravenous holiday will swallow Thanksgiving whole. It will be folded into one big mega-season, to be renamed “Thanks-Mas.”

The entire back-story of America—with starving Puritans freezing their asses off that first fall until local natives took pity on their sorry butts, and brought them a noodle casserole—will get lost in the “Thanks-Mas” rush. Instead, the Pilgrims will be rebranded as anxious shoppers, bulking up on turkey and mashed potatoes before the doors opened up at 5 a.m. sharp at Squanto’s SuperMall, conveniently located just off of Route 95.

Originally, the season was known as “Thanks-Christ-Mas,” but for fear that the term might possibly offend .000000001% of the customers, slick ad men for colonial retailers shortened it up a bit.

Back at the Plymouth settlement, the men folk gathered at the publick house, drank a little too much grog, and watched the Detroit Lions lose (again!).

Young Goodman Brown was the first person to hang his colorful Thanks-Mas lights from the eaves of his log hut that Thursday evening in 1621, but annoyed neighbors promptly dragged him from his home and stoned him to death in the town square. (Soon the natives would become disgusted and invent their own holiday, known as “Quonset.”)

Then suddenly, right on cue, retro-looking 1960s-era stop-motion puppets walked haltingly into the village commons and began singing joyfully, thus reminding the colonists the true meaning of “Thanks-Mas.”

So Happy Thanks-Mas to all!

And don’t forget the reason for the season…which is, um…ah…is…um…oh dang, what was it again?

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

I published my first blog post
over four years ago (on the now defunct Switch 2 Plan B site), just a few days
after falling off a fire engine and severely spraining my ankle. (See a pattern
here?) That injury also resulted in time off the job and rehabilitation at the
local physical therapy clinic. I wrote about my experiences at the time, and
since I’m returning to that same clinic this week, I thought I would re-post
it below:

When it comes to an injury like
torn ligaments, there are actually two kinds of pain: The first is the initial
trauma, localized to the injury site, characterized by sudden onset, acute
intensity, and relatively short duration. The second comes weeks later and is
inflicted by a physical therapist during something he gleefully calls
“rehabilitation.”

If you ask me, the person who really needs “rehabilitation”
here is the therapist himself—but only after serving a nickel in Chino state
pen.

But I kid. My therapist is a
great guy. His name is Greg. When I first went to see Greg, he took me back to
his exam room for a “consultation.” This involved careful assessment and
palpation of the injured joint, making sure to flex it into positions that
would have been considered unnatural even if completely healthy. The important
thing, apparently, is to slowly rotate the ankle until the patient begins to
weep.

Then with the help of two
assistants, Greg dragged me into the back room for more intensive “treatment.”
There, they continued a therapeutic regime specifically tailored to my injury,
while I struggled to maintain consciousness.

Greg’s assistant is Radz, an
ex-Army Ranger. He just got back from a tour in Iraq, where he served as a
physical therapist at Abu Ghraib. The patients still talk about him there.
After a dishonorable discharge, Radz returned state-side and worked in a
rendering plant before Greg recognized his obvious talents and took him under
his wing.

Greg’s intern is Lauren, whose
specialty is asking things like “Does that hurt?” “No? How about now?” It’s
also her job to hook me up to the car battery after the other two have grown
bored of me.

I know our therapy session is
concluded when I wake up in the alley behind the clinic. Oftentimes I find that
I have soiled myself, but Greg assures me that this is normal and many of those
who have survived have done the same thing.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

When it comes to healing time or the prognosis for a
complete recovery, conventional wisdom holds that it may be better to have a
broken bone rather than a sprain, torn ligament, or—in my case—a "bruised" bone.

I’m not sure if that’s true, but since falling off my firetruck almost two weeks ago, I followed up with an orthopedic surgeon for
another round of x-rays. The diagnosis: A sub-periosteal hematoma (or bruise)
of the olecranon, that large bony prominence that projects behind the elbow. (See #4 below.)

My EMT anatomy class was 17 years ago, and the subject rarely
comes up in CE review, so I had forgotten you could actually “bruise” a bone. Most
people think of bones as being hard and not particularly vascular, but in fact,
this rigid tissue is well supplied by various arteries (receiving 10-20% of all
cardiac output) and is protected by thick, fibrous membrane called the
periosteum.

Direct force trauma against the bone—the kind of impact one
might receive when, oh, say, falling off a fire truck—can result in a hematoma,
or collection of blood, underneath this protective layer. And unfortunately
this sort of injury can be quite painful and take weeks, months, or even a year
to heal completely.

So I got THAT going for me.

Maybe it would have been better to just break the damn
thing—you know, set it and forget it. But no.

My elbow is still noticeably swollen, and if I bump it
against anything—the arm of a chair, for example—the jolt of pain can light me
up. So in addition to icing and
NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), I’ll be starting physical
therapy this week to beginning rehabbing this thing.

Of course, it could ALWAYS be worse: My buddy blew out his
entire knee recently. I’m sure he was doing to something glorious at the time,
like saving babies from a burning building. Certainly not something as prosaic
as tumbling off the fire apparatus.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Like I don’t have enough to deal with right now, my wife has
me on some sort of juicing diet.

She saw this documentary on Netflix about an overweight
Aussie with an autoimmune disease who walked 3000 miles while limiting his diet
to juiced fruits and vegetables. Of course, by movie’s end, he had shed 72
pounds and was finally cured of his life-threatening illness. His feet were a little sore, though.

The movie won Best Documentary Feature at a film festival
somewhere in Iowa.

Still, the remarkable story squeezed new life from the juicing
craze with the “Reboot Your Life” program—a “journey into wellness” in which
one consumes only liquefied plant matter. Nom, nom. The testimonials are
impressive: A housewife in Kankakee, Illinois lost 102 lbs, and her acne cleared-up.
A man in Toledo, Ohio disappeared altogether. And since my blood pressure has been
a little elevated lately, my well-meaning spouse decided that I too might
benefit from such a regimen.

So she purchased a Breville, the “Mercedes Benz” of juicing
machines. (I think an actual Mercedes would have been cheaper.) This precision-engineered,
surgical steel contraption has spinning blades so razor-sharp it could slice off Rube Goldberg's ring finger just as easily as frappe an entire beet.

Yes, beets.

Beta vulgaris, from the Chenopodiaceae family of plants, the same root that starving Muscovites use to make Borscht, a cold soup
that can make me vomit on sight. But toss in a few pears, some crisp Fuji apples,
celery stalks and a carrot or two and—voila—you have a healthy elixir that is
equal parts nutritious and delicious!

Well, maybe delicious is an overstatement…

How about barely drinkable?

Really, the only interesting thing about this juice diet is
how to cheat it. But since the pantry has been purged of all foods that either
A.) might contribute to my slight hypertension, or B.) have any flavor
whatsoever, a reckless binge here might consist of unsalted almond butter on sprouted
grain bread.